** FILE ** California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger points during a news conference while pushing his plan for pension reform Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005, in San Diego. Schwarzenegger dropped out of a lucrative deal with a publishing company when he was criticized for possible conflicts of interest. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi, File) A FEB 10, 2005 FILE PHOTO

Christmas came early for the lawyers who won a public-interest lawsuit to make San Francisco schools more accessible to the disabled.

A federal judge awarded the legal eagles $6.95 million for their work. That's less than the $9 million the lawyers had been asking for, but substantially more than the $2 million the school's insurance would cover.

So now officials may have to dip into the district's already stretched general fund to pay the bill.

But before you bring out the lynching rope, it should be noted that U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said the cash-strapped district had "largely brought this award of attorney fees and costs on itself" by dragging its heels on the case.

The attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that they had spent 5 1/2 years working on the case before the district settled just days before the trial was supposed to start in June 2004. They logged 20,000 hours in lawyer and paralegal work and rang up $1 million in expenses, the attorneys said.

For their part, district officials said there wasn't much they could do until voters agreed to a bond to pay for making schools more accessible.

Whatever the case, district spokeswoman Lorna Ho said school board members and their attorneys would be huddling over the next couple of days to figure out where to go from here. She wouldn't say whether an appeal was being considered.

"We have assets -- real estate and other things -- but we've had to close schools this year, so the financial picture is not pretty," Ho said. The district shut five schools last spring to help erase a $22.5 million deficit.

By the way, we should point out that the judge did knock back or deny some of the attorneys' billings -- which ranged from $200 to an eye-popping $810 an hour.

All performed in the public's interest, of course.

Giant headache: We probably haven't heard the last of that headline- grabbing Giants/KNBR radio flap that led to the abrupt firing of talk jock Larry Krueger and two other station employees.

Reliable sources tell us that Krueger and his banished cohorts are talking to attorneys about possible legal action against the station.

Krueger, in particular, is pointing an accusing finger at station Senior Vice President Tony Salvadore for supposedly egging on his Giants tough-talk act in the first place, and accusing the Giants' front office of pressuring the station to fire him.

The react from Salvadore: "No comment."

And from the Giants: "Nobody at the Giants ever asked for Krueger to be fired -- that's plain and simple," said Larry Baer, the team's executive vice president.

Baer said the team had actually been working with KNBR so no one would be fired over the affair, and hadn't heard about the cannings until 15 minutes before the station announced them.

There are strong feelings both inside the station and among the Giants that Krueger didn't really deserve to lose his job for referring to "brain- dead Caribbean hitters" and commenting that Giants manager Felipe Alou's brain had turned to Cream of Wheat.

The consensus is that Krueger fell victim to events that mushroomed out of control when Alou went on ESPN calling Krueger a "messenger of Satan."

For a while things appeared to be calming down. But when KNBR jabbed back with a morning show bit mocking Alou, station manager Salvadore saw an even bigger train wreck in the making -- especially since his Susquehanna Radio Corp.-owned station was for sale and its license was up for renewal later this year.

So Salvadore handed out pink slips not only to Krueger, but to morning show producer Tony Rhein and his boss, veteran program director Bob Agnew.

So far, none of the three is talking publicly about the details of their firings. But stay tuned for more charges and countercharges -- that is, unless lawyers manage to settle it all first.

Big bang: Bang or bust, Arnold's big Stones bash Sunday night at Fenway Park is still the talk of the town -- from here to Boston.

The plan was to resell tickets to the Stones kickoff concert for $10,000 to raise big money for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's November special election initiatives.

For $100,000, you got to meet and greet with Arnold himself at a preconcert luxury box wing-ding.

Reviews of the bash, however, were mixed at best.

The Boston Herald judged that Arnold's "high-voltage foray" into the Hub (as Boston calls itself) was a "VIP fiasco," reporting that controversy over the election turned the $10,000- to $100,000-a-head tickets into "box office poison."

"Schwarzenegger also managed to clumsily snub (Massachusetts Republican) Gov. Mitt Romney by not calling his fellow guv before swanning into town," the paper reported.

Then there were the pickets, including a dozen or so California nurses who traveled across the country to protest Schwarzenegger's policies.

One of the those nurses was Kelly DiGiacomo -- a self-styled Arnold stalker who managed to get a last-minute ticket to the concert and went in dressed in her full uniform.

"I had a really good seat about 20 rows from the stage," where she could see Arnold's near-empty box, DiGiacomo told us.

"I stood up (in cap and uniform) and waved at him. The guy he was sitting with nudged him and pointed at me -- but Arnold wouldn't look at me," DiGiacomo said.

When quizzed by Chronicle political writer Carla Marinucci, Marty Wilson, the chief fundraiser for Schwarzenegger, wouldn't specifically dispute reports that sales of the $100,000 seats for the preconcert event were less than stellar.

"We raised a substantial sum of money," Wilson said, though he declined to say how much, how many tickets were sold or at what price.

"It was a good event," Wilson said. "The donors had a real good time."